


12:  Rookie Train Wreck

by light_source



Series: High Heat [12]
Category: Baseball RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-29
Updated: 2011-07-29
Packaged: 2017-10-21 22:52:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/230743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/light_source/pseuds/light_source
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you’re twenty-three, the remedy for all of this is pretty simple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	12:  Rookie Train Wreck

Like most guys his age, Tim has always assumed faster is better: pitch speed, reaction times, the express line, the left lane. Sex, too; it’s always been like someone was standing there clocking his velocity with a radar gun: _git ‘er done._ And shit, when you’re young, most of the time you _are_ being hurried up. If it's not your girlfriend’s midnight curfew, it's something else - a police flashlight, your roommate’s key in the door.

Zito, who gets them out with his curveball, has slow in his hands.

//

Tim reaches up to try to haul Barry down onto him, but Zito deftly parries, pressing both his shoulders back onto the bed, and for a second Tim wonders what he’s gotten himself into.

\- Wait, Zito says. - Not yet.

He kisses Tim slowly and deliberately on the mouth, but there’s no tongue; it’s though a part of him has vanished. Tim feels his own breath, coppery and dry, rise hot in his throat.

Tim’s eyes flicker open. In the faint light, he can see that Zito’s eyes are soft, unfocused, as though his mind’s either somewhere else - or completely here and now; impossible to tell which. The callused fingertips of his pitching hand are almost abrasive, like Tim’s own, strange and familiar at the same time.

Barry throws a leg over Tim, then, straddling him, bends down to use his mouth to explore the places he’s gone with his hands. Tim lets out a hiss of breath as he feels Zito’s lips travel over his neck and his chest. No place goes untouched, untasted. He shivers as he feels Zito’s warm mouth, the edges of his teeth, kissing his nipples, the insides of his arms, breathing in the musky scent of his armpits, the bowl-shaped hollows of his hipbones. Zito’s hands are in his hair, knotting and unspooling like the kneading of a cat.

Tim’s body is humming with desire, a pressure that spills outward from his pelvis and lights up the surface of his skin. It’s as though Zito’s touch has slowed time to the feel of _now_ around him. He becomes intensely aware of the cold smoothness of the cotton sheets bunched around his feet, the sharp shadows of the lamplight on the moldings. His own head against a pillow that smells of laundry soap, and of sleep. Zito’s skin and his breath, like something dark and familiar, the ground in the woods.

Feeling like he’s rising to the surface fighting for breath, Tim frees his own hands - Zito doesn’t slap them back this time - and runs them down Zito’s chest to the curve of his ass. He feels the hitch of pleasure in his belly, the soft moan, when he takes Zito’s cock in his left hand and begins to stroke him.

Then, in a moment of exquisite shock, Tim feels Zito’s hand on his own hard length. It feels so good that Tim can’t keep from moaning a little. He closes his eyes, thrusts his hips into the touch, crying _unh_ and _yes_ , terrified Zito will stop.

Blindly he lunges up, seeking, needing Zito’s mouth on his, and they both come that way, agonized, ecstatic, giving themselves up to the point of release.

//

Tim awakens to cottony grey light and the hiss of steam from one of the ancient radiators. It’s a minute before his eyes can focus. His gym bag’s still there on the floor, next to his pile of shed clothes. The alarm clock’s somehow come unplugged, so he crawls across the floor and snags his wristwatch. He has twenty-six minutes to get to the yard.

He pads over to the tiny kitchen, fixes himself a bowl of cereal, and takes it back to the mattress. He perches cross-legged on the corner of the bed, eating, hunched, the only sound in the room the clink of the spoon against the bowl.

When he turns his cellphone on, the only messages are from his dad and his brother Sean. As soon as he slams out the front door into the foggy morning, he turns it off.

//

June 13, 2007

In the last game of the home series against Toronto, Tim’s paired with a rookie catcher who’s making his major-league debut after eleven-and-a-half years in the minors.

On the mound, Tim scuffs up the dirt next to the rubber to get it the way he likes. As he throws his warmup pitches, Tim sizes up Rodriguez. The catcher’s round as an apple, with a carefully trimmed goatee that suggests patience and precision. When Tim squints to loosen his eyes, Rodriguez’s mitt becomes the center of a series of circles, a good home-plate target.

But his attention wanders to right field, where the colors of the crowd flicker like heat haze. For the past week, Tim’s been in a kind of stop-action blur, arrested by a changed sense of his body in time. Stuff he’s always taken for granted, like the finely tuned catapult motion of his delivery, has started to seem grotesque, unreal, like the free-fall of a person who’s thrown himself off a bridge.

All his life, Tim’s body has been three steps ahead of him, vaulting over parking meters for the sheer insane joy of it. In a few days he’ll be twenty-three, another mile down the track towards cortisone injections and Tommy John surgery. All for the hurling of a ball.

//

That afternoon, Tim throws hard. But his fastball’s up and his breaking stuff caroms off the mound at angles that Rodriguez can't block. The ball seems to have its own mind. After Bochy yanks him in the middle of the fourth, Tim stamps back to the dugout, where his teammates scatter, suddenly busy.

His ERA’s closing in on ten. He has yet to go more than five innings in a game.

Tim thinks about Fresno, what Chase said about the car dealership. He thinks about Venezuelan guys who’ve spent twelve years toiling in the minors, waiting for that big day. He doubts Rodriguez will be saving a copy of the _Chronicle_ ’s obituary for their game, “Rookie Train Wreck.”

//

June 14, 2007

It’s a long flight to Boston, where the Giants are set to play at the Fenway for the first time in ninety-two years. Tim snags himself a bulkhead row, and as soon as the wheels go up, he pushes back the armrests and curls up across the seats to sleep. When they hit turbulence over the Rockies, one of the flight attendants checks his seatbelt. She pulls the blue fleece blanket up to his chin and tucks it around his back. He flinches a little under her touch, mumbling in his sleep.

She pauses at the row behind him, where Nate Schierholtz, Tim’s fellow rookie, is absorbed in a movie he’s watching on his laptop. Nate’s even greener than Tim - he’s hasn’t even been up from Fresno a week, and he starts in right field tomorrow.

\- How _old_ is he? she asks, tilting her head in the direction of Tim.

Nate, who can only half-hear her, pushes back his headphones. He leans forward, peers over the seat back, and sees it’s Lincecum sleeping.

\- Twenty-three, same as me, says Nate, grinning. - He just looks like a kid.

The flight attendant raises her eyebrows and shakes her head a little, smiling back at Nate.

\- He’s little but he’s fierce, Nate tells her. - You can put money on it, he’s the one of us you’re gonna remember.

//

June 15, 2007

The first game of the Boston series is a train wreck too, ten to two, but it’s Barry Zito’s train wreck.

And since Zito’s hardly said a word to him for the past five days, Tim feels free not to give a fuck.

Besides, it’s his birthday and the Ritz-Carlton, which is all beige and tasteful and immaculate, makes Tim long for home. As if he had one. It’s not his dad’s place in Renton, where his old room’s become a baseball shrine and the empty kitchen reminds him of his mom. And it’s not the dusty studio he’s rented in San Francisco, where he’ll never unpack most of those boxes.

When you’re twenty-three, the remedy for all of this is pretty simple.

Proper birthday wastage, at a mahogany-paneled bar called Henry’s, involves drinks Tim doesn’t know the name of and so many teammates jammed around the table that they have to pull up an extra row of chairs. Tim sinks gratefully into the ball-busting and the dirty jokes and it’s not long before he finds himself dead happy just to be in the middle of the table.

By the small hours they’re so blazed that they’ve forgotten what city they’re in, and the guys who’re still there reluctantly herd themselves up and out into the warm June night. Four of them pile into one cab, Tim and Noah Lowry and Kevin Frandsen and Brian Wilson, and they rollick back to the Ritz-Carlton.

They jam themselves likewise into the elevator and hit twelve. When it stops at the third floor and Barry Zito steps on, though, the atmosphere changes. Though the guys are still laughing, and Wilson’s poking Lowry in the ear, Zito’s notably quiet, and by the time they all get off at the twelfth, the guys spill out purposefully down the split corridor to their rooms.

Off to the left goes Wilson, who’s singing an old Curtis Mayfield song, with Lowry, who tries to shush him, pointing to his watch.

Tim and Zito both have rooms at the end of the right corridor, down by the ice machine. The last thing they hear is Wilson’s falsetto keening away in the other direction, _You just git on bo---arrrrrd._

Tim’s a few steps ahead of Zito, who doesn’t try to catch up. They make their way down the hall that way, neither together nor apart, and before Tim gets to his room, he’s already fumbling in his pocket for the keycard. Zito stops him, one hand on his arm.

\- Can I talk to you? says Zito.

\- No, says Lincecum, his jaw thrust forward, pushing the door open with his elbow.

Tim doesn’t look up, but he hears Zito let out a breath. By the time the door clicks shut behind Tim, Zito’s already gone.


End file.
